Nokia to finalize Trolltech acquisition today

Nokia's acquisition of Trolltech has received approval of the European …

The European Commission has issued final approval of Nokia's bid to acquire Trolltech. Nokia expects to move forward with the deal and finalize the approximately $150 million acquisition today. This acquisition arrives during a time of major transitions for Nokia, which is moving beyond manufacturing and repositioning itself in the market as a broader web-oriented software solutions provider.

The mobile phone giant initially revealed plans for the acquisition in a joint announcement with Trolltech in January. Nokia hopes to leverage the portability Trolltech's popular Qt application development toolkit to help developers bring their applications to a multitude of devices and software platforms. The latest release, Qt 4.4, is the first version to include full support for Windows CE. We suspect that Nokia's first order of business will be to add support for its own Symbian-based S60 operating system.

Nokia says that it will fully embrace Trolltech's existing commitment to the open source community and has become a patron of the KDE desktop environment project. The 1998 KDE Free Qt Agreement—which stipulates automatic LGPL release of the Qt libraries in the event that development halts or its license ceases to be open—further insulates the community from any potential deviations from Trolltech's open source commitment.

Although there will probably be some initial transitional challenges and corporate culture clashes, the long-term impact will likely be very positive. Nokia has the resources to push forward Qt development in new ways and extend support to additional mobile platforms, which in turn will open up a broader audience for KDE and other software that is built on Qt.